Society

In the months following Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, conversation on college campuses has been defined by a palpable tension. Increased antisemitic and anti-Muslim rhetoric embroiled numerous universities in free-speech debates. In late April, as the Israel-Hamas War moved into its fifth month, students at Columbia University and other institutions across the US began…

A lawsuit filed Wednesday against Meta argues that US law requires the company to let people use unofficial add-ons to gain more control over their social feeds. It’s the latest in a series of disputes in which the company has tussled with researchers and developers over tools that give users extra privacy options or that…

The Biden administration is asking the world’s largest technology companies to publicly commit to tightening the digital security of their software and cloud services. The voluntary pledge, first reported by WIRED, represents the latest effort by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to build support for its Secure by Design…

one day in March 2023, Arati Prabhakar brought a laptop into the Oval Office and showed the future to Joe Biden. Six months later, the president issued a sweeping executive order that set a regulatory course for AI. This all happened because ChatGPT had stunned the world. In an instant it became very, very obvious…

Shawn Wright worries a lot about his mom. Wright, a 50-year-old IT manager from Oklahoma City, lives more than 1,300 miles from his elderly mother in Philadelphia and stays connected with her through regular phone calls, rudimentary texting, and a security camera system. He says she’s generally hesitant to welcome new technology into her life,…

At a tech forum in Beijing last week, a Chinese company unveiled a “homegrown” brain-computer interface that allowed a monkey to seemingly control a robotic arm just by thinking about it. In a video shown at the event, a monkey with its hands restrained uses the interface to move a robotic arm and grasp a…

Slowly but surely, Apple TV+ is finding its feet. The streaming service, which at launch we called “odd, angsty, and horny as hell,” has evolved into a diverse library of dramas, documentaries, and comedies. Now, it’s library is so packed, we’ve declared it “the new HBO.” Curious but don’t know where to get started? Below…

The disruption to GPS services started getting worse on Christmas Day. Planes and ships moving around southern Sweden and Poland lost connectivity as their radio signals were interfered with. Since then, the region around the Baltic Sea—including neighboring Germany, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—has faced persistent attacks against GPS systems. Tens of thousands of planes…

The Biden administration officially ended the national and public health emergency for Covid-19 in May of 2023, and mask mandates have been dropped in every state throughout the country. But with the virus still mutating (the current strain being SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant JN.1) and cases ongoing, it’s still acceptable to continue masking (and testing) if…

The Biden administration is updating the US government’s blueprint for protecting the country’s most important infrastructure from hackers, terrorists, and natural disasters. On Tuesday, President Joe Biden signed a national security memorandum overhauling a 2013 directive that lays out how agencies work together, with private companies, and with state and local governments to improve the…